A boy weeps for a man who US Army soldiers said fired on them with an AK-47 was shot and killed near the village of Samir Kalacheh in Arghandab Valley north of Kandahar July 28, 2010. (REUTERS/Bob Strong)

A man touches the body of a man who US Army soldiers said fired at them with an AK-47, after he was shot and killed near the village of Samir Kalacheh in the Arghandab Valley north of Kandahar on July 28, 2010. Though soldiers said they saw three men shooting at them and returned fire, killing one man and injuring another, local people were protesting that the dead man was a farmer from Samir Kalacha village. (REUTERS/Bob Strong)

Staff Sgt. Brenden Patterson, a Pararescueman, or "PJ," of the 58th Rescue Squadron, of Las Vegas, scans for threats while sitting in the open doorway, with the door-gunner visible in the background, on a rescue mission aboard a Pavehawk CASEVAC helicopter in Kandahar province, southern Afghanistan on Wednesday July 28, 2010. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley)

Master Sgt. Todd Nelson sits for Dr. Joe Villalobos as he makes adjustments to a prosthetic ear at Wilford Hall Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas on June 23, 2010. Nelson was injured in 2007 by an explosion while serving in Afghanistan. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

Items for sale in the Nader Pashtun Market in Kabul, Afghanistan, where virtually everything comes from China. While the headlines focus on the U.S.-led war against the Taliban, China's spreading global footprint has become highly visible in Afghanistan, and the U.S. is said to welcome it. Photo taken on June 28, 2010. (AP Photo/Musadeq Sadeq)

This past month, much of the attention focused on Afghanistan centered on the release of thousands of classified documents from the war effort by WikiLeaks. While the consensus appears to be that nothing significantly new was revealed by the release, the picture painted by the documents remains rather bleak. NATO and the United States now have 143,000 troops in Afghanistan, set to peak at 150,000 in coming weeks as they take a counter-insurgency offensive into the insurgents' southern strongholds. Taliban control remains difficult to dislodge, and once removed from an area, Taliban forces often return once larger forces leave a region, especially in rural areas where local government presence remains small

Perfectly circular, powerful Hurricane Celia spaned hundreds of miles over the Pacific Ocean in this image from June 24, 2010. Rough-textured clouds surround the storm’s distinct eye. Farther from the center of the storm, spiral arms appear thinner and smoother.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS, on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this true-color image of Hurricane Celia at 1:55 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time on June 24, 2010. Just five minutes later, the U.S. National Hurricane Center classified Celia as a Category 4 hurricane with sustained winds of 135 miles per hour.